Remember Mobile Phones?

[Huxleys Babkins]

A rich kid in school got a new phone and handed his old one over to me. It was that phone from The Matrix - the one where you could push a button to make the mouthpiece zoom out - and the kid was so rich that it can't have been more than a few months after the film had come out that he was happy to give it away for nowt.

Anyway, about 50% of the time the button would fling the mouthpiece out with such force it disconnected from the body of the phone and went skittering away across the floor.

My mate had one of those. 7110. The first time he brought it into college, the mouthpiece shot across the canteen never to be found again. He went through three of them before the phone shop gave him a different model and a reduction on his bill to compensate.

Putting my Buzby hat on, the 7110 wasn't actually the phone from the Matrix. Neo's phone was an 8110 that had been modified to add the spring-loaded mouthpiece. The real 8110 required the mouthpiece to be manually extended and the spring-loaded 7110 was Nokia's response to the popularity of the film.

[katzenjammer]

Here's my history as far as I can remember

Apart from the first four they have all been company phones but I wonder how much this lot cost?  And ohhh, what a horrible amount of e-waste :(

Designs have got very boring since iphones/smart phones have been around haven't they? The weirdest phone out of that lot was the Sony (third from right) that had very distinctive ringtones that kind of sounded like electronic birdsong.  The vibrate function was generated by the speaker itself.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

On my 7th phone since '97

Fuck, never considered that. Not too shabby! I'd also probably still be using my last phone, the OnePlus3 if it hadn't slid off my leg and smashed in the departure lounge of Banja Luka airport in April 2019.

[beanheadmcginty]

Held onto a Nokia 1100 until 2016 when I got a girlfriend who texted me so regularly that paying £20 a year PAYG was no longer viable. The weird thing is that I used to have quite frequent dreams about my Nokia magically upgrading itself overnight and suddenly having new functions. When I eventually got a smartphone I discovered that this was actually a thing that happens to them.

[kngen]

No mention of the Sony Ericsson W810i yet? The best of all the phones. Can't really think of any faults with it and if I was to ever eschew a touch screen phone I'd go back to that as soon as I could find one. Wish I could remember the forum I used to go on that had loads of Russians hacking around with SETool to enable all sorts of weird and wonderful features on it, including the ability to remove the network lock.

Glad someone mentioned this, as I couldn't remember what the model number was. Brilliant and beautiful little thing. I wish I'd held onto mine. When I lost my iPod, I went back to using it as an mp3 player and was stunned at how much better it sounded. Never bought another Apple product again, and stayed with Sony during the smartphone revolution, until Samsung superseded them in pretty much every department.

[Sebastian Cobb]

So is anyone going to cough to having one of the magic Phillips/Cellnet phones that stored the credit on the phone and with the addition of a magic little pic chip could just tell it that it had £10 credit every time you turned it on?

Just to expand on this I still think it's mind-boggling that Cellnet in the early days of pay as you go went 'yeah lets store the balance on the phone itself, there's no way that could go wrong' I'd have loved to have listened to the discussions on that one because I assume most engineers would've had some reservations about it.

Apparently (found this on a phone forum so am willing to accept it might not be 100% accurate) the chip people put in wasn't very sophisticated at all either, the balance was stored on an eeprom and the chip just wrote the value to an unused portion of the eeprom during start up and then copied the value back during shutdown.

[idunnosomename]

My entire phone history (unless i've forgotten any)

It took a depressingly long amount of time to remember them all and collate them, they might not be in the correct order either.

imagine putting all of those up your bum at the same time

[Sebastian Cobb]

I had that Xpressmusic one. I needed it for the camera and I don't think I ever used it as an mp3 player.

The reason I needed the camera was because my dissertation was an 'engine' that could lift mms' out of email and display them on a social networking site.

Yes I invented Instagram.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Here's a series about whacky old phone designs. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwd8abTO4vh2smuMzykXDOPNnsxhHC4Oh

my word, that second "Matrix phone" was ugly - which is appropriate, given the sequel films were similarly inferior to the first.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I had an aftermarket 'matrix phone' fascia for my 3210 with a spring-loaded slider.

[Gulftastic]

My first was an Ericsson GA628, pay as you go, except you hade to pay a daily service charge of about 30p, if memory serves, meaning even if you didn't use it, you still had to keep topping the thing up.

PAYG phones were dirt cheap back then, before they cottoned onto to the much more profitable contract model we all use now. I bobbled along with pay as you go phones until the mid 00's, when Virgin offered me a Blackberry with unlimited data for a tenner a month. Never looked back since.

[touchingcloth]

I had an aftermarket 'matrix phone' fascia for my 3210 with a spring-loaded slider.

The best bit about the "proper" Matrix phones was the case material. I remember it being slightly iridescent like an oil slick or beetle wings. Kind of made up for the self-destruct mode of the slider. 

[Sebastian Cobb]

The best bit about the "proper" Matrix phones was the case material. I remember it being slightly iridescent like an oil slick or beetle wings. Kind of made up for the self-destruct mode of the slider.

That sort of finish has aged really badly. Goes all sticky and weird.

[touchingcloth]

A kid at school had this Sony Ericsson thing:



I think it ran Symbian. The only thing I can remember that it had going for it for a 15 year old at the time was that it could "do porn". The kid managed to break his first handset and then bought a replacement from eBay where he was scammed by the same seller TWICE - once sending full payment for the phone, then sending it all over again when the seller said they hadn't received anything. I've written about this guy before - he's the kid whose car we turfed in the school carpark.

[Sebastian Cobb]

One of my my mates had one of the first Nokia camera phones. When other Nokias were tiny it was a bit of a unit, much bigger in each dimension than a pack of cigs.

The camera was dreadful and nobody else had one so it was entirely pointless.

I think I could count on one hand how many mms' I've sent. Send pictures quite a bit on whatsapp but that's 'cos they're free innit.

I find it odd how in America push-to-talk functionality was common-place (and sometimes free) but in UK/Europe I've never seen it used, I've seen it an option in the phone settings but it has always been disabled by the carrier.

[canadagoose]

My entire phone history (unless i've forgotten any)

It took a depressingly long amount of time to remember them all and collate them, they might not be in the correct order either.

I had the first phone in that picture - I remember it didn't even have a clock, so I'd end up phoning the US speaking clock for a few seconds to find out the time.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I had the first phone in that picture - I remember it didn't even have a clock, so I'd end up phoning the US speaking clock for a few seconds to find out the time.

I think I might've briefly had a motorola that when you got an SMS didn't bother to check if you had stored the number in the phonebook so you had no real idea who it came from. Maddening.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

While we're getting nostalgic about portable gadgetry, Psion organizers seemed like the dog's bollocks when I was a youth.



I expect I'd get bored of it in about ten minutes if I actually got one - and it wouldn't hold a candle to even the most basic smartphone - but they still seem kind of cool.

[Gulftastic]

I like that Zoolander did the phones will get smaller and smaller gag right before they started getting bigger and bigger.

[katzenjammer]

I think I might've briefly had a motorola that when you got an SMS didn't bother to check if you had stored the number in the phonebook so you had no real idea who it came from. Maddening.

I think the Siemens c25 I had did that. I'd forgotten and now feel cross about it all over again

[Blumf]

While we're getting nostalgic about portable gadgetry, Psion organizers seemed like the dog's bollocks when I was a youth.



I expect I'd get bored of it in about ten minutes if I actually got one - and it wouldn't hold a candle to even the most basic smartphone - but they still seem kind of cool.

I did most my course work on one of them. It was brilliant just being able to flip it open and start typing. Could even plug it straight into the printer.

They genuinely were an amazing bit of kit. A full fledge computer that fit in your pocket and ran off two AAs.

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

Was just trying to remember all the phones I had down the years, including being double Blackberried for a while.

Phillips Diga
Ericsson GA628
Nokia 5110
Nokia 3210
Siemens S35
Nokia 6210
Nokia 6310i
Nokia 6020
Nokia 6230i
QTEK 9100
HTC s620
HTC Touch Diamond
Blackberry 7200
Blackberry Bold
Blackberry Storm
Samsung Galaxy S2
Blackberry Q10
Blackberry Z10
Samsung Galaxy S6
Huawei P10
Huawei P40 Lite
Samsung A52

And whatever iPhones work has been given me for the last few years.
And excluding whatever twin sim dumbphones I used to have for my old job.

[timebug]

I used to go mountaineering ,on a small scale, with a bunch of mates. Often in Wales. As soon as we arrived, tents would go up, kettle on, and everyone tried to phone home to reassure loved ones that we were safely here. They all had the latest bang up to date slim phones, early smart phones etc. I had a bog standard Nokia pay as you go job. And I always got my call through with no bother, as the others walked around holding phones aloft searching for a signal. Many a year,they all ended up borrowing my cheapo phone,as their more sophisticated models would not get anywhere! Prior to 'borrowing' my phone they had all poured scorn on it, and dsnmissed it as a cheap and nasty piece of junk. Hey ho!

[mothman]

That sort of finish has aged really badly. Goes all sticky and weird.

My 7110 seems to be holding up. Spring has lost its tension though. I remember when I got it, Orange had stuck some little embossed logo on the slider. Ruined the whole look. I was furious about it for about a tear until one day, sitting in a pub somewhere in London, I casually flicked the edge of it with my fingernail and it came off just like that.

[touchingcloth]

How do people feel about physical versus software qwerty keyboards? I've never had a mobile with a physical keyboard, I skipped straight from texting using the number pad to having a smartphone, and on the occasions I've needed to use someone else's Blackberry with its teeny happy keys I've found it a nightmare.

Are Blackberries still a thing? Amazing how all of the serious business folk seemed to junk them overnight. It can't have been more than a couple of years that they were ubiquitous with a certain type of cunt, but I haven't seen one for an age.

[Dex Sawash]

Lost mine for about an  hour yesterday, had left it in the freezer.

[Icehaven]

I remember my ex buying a phone from Argos probably about 12ish years ago that was partly sold as a music phone, so he bought an SD card at the same time to increase the storage, then when he got it home realised it couldn't take SD cards, so with the inbuilt memory only it could fit about 10 songs on it. He took it back and Argos admitted it was strange and accepted the return, but what a stupid design. Can't remember what it was though.

[mothman]

It's literally ridiculous how many phones I've had at this point.

Nokia 3110 (still have this)
An Ericsson piece of shit
Nokia 7110 (and this)
Three or four other Nokias
An early Windows phone that wiped if it ran out of power
A BlackBerry
Motorola SLVR L7
Motorola RIZR Z8
About four or five iPhones

So it looks like the other Nokias were a 3310, a 6610 and possibly a 6700..?

I loved the 6610. It had a radio, no camera (didn't want one), and a gorgeous piano-black case. Which then got broken, and couldn't be replaced (has to buy a commercial case to replace it). I used it as my main non-work phone (which were the aforementioned Windows phone and then the Blackberry) on and off for years, especially after the possible 6700 died...

... did you know there's an ombudsman for mobile phones? I found this out the hard way. I got the possible 6700 from Carphone Whorehouse on a contract. After a month it died. They repaired it. It died again. This time they accused me of doing it deliberately. So I put in a complaint to OffMobe or whatever they're called, full account of what had happened. They ruled in my favour and told CW to sort it out. CW gave me £200 credit to buy a new non-contract handset. I did - a BB Curve - and sold it new on eBay, pocketed the cash, and carried on using the phone I'd already got to replace it, a HTC Wildfire (forgot to list this one). Soon as the contract was up, I switched to SIM-only EE deals and iPhones direct from Apple, and have done ever since.

[Jasha]

My entire phone history (unless i've forgotten any)

It took a depressingly long amount of time to remember them all and collate them, they might not be in the correct order either.

Had both those LG touchscreen ones  (E55?) before they abandoned mobiles for 100 inch teles, shame as it only left Motorola to fill the bargain bucket end.

[The Ombudsman]

This was my fist mobile. It could receive text messages but couldn't send them. '98 I think.